


matthews, mo

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam doesn’t ask for much—it’s never been a habit of his to demand things of the people around him, and especially not now, covered head, hands, and feet in gauze and silver clips. He’s been almost infuriatingly silent on the subject of things he wants these days; so when he quietly asks Dean if they can spend some time outside today, Dean’s almost chomping at the bit to say yes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	matthews, mo

Sam doesn’t ask for much—it’s never been a habit of his to demand things of the people around him, and especially not now, covered head, hands, and feet in gauze and silver clips. He’s been almost infuriatingly silent on the subject of things he wants these days; so when he quietly asks Dean if they can spend some time outside today, Dean’s almost chomping at the bit to say yes.

_Almost_ being the key word.

“You sure that’s a good idea, Sammy?” he asks, looking pointedly at the bandages that are wrapping his little brother up like a mock-up of a Halloween mummy. The crown of thorns came down a few days ago and looking at the white gauze wrapped around Sam’s head puts Dean in mind of childhood injuries and fractured skulls that he’d rather not revisit, and if Sam is this unnerving to him, he can only imagine what the ignorant public will think. “I mean—you kinda look like you escaped from an ER.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Yeah, and what are you gonna tell people when they ask what a guy in a head bandage is doing in the middle of a park with a playground full of kids?” Dean reaches out to smoothe a bit of Sam’s hair back from where it’s come out over the gauze. “ _God poked me full of holes, sorry for scaring your little bundle of joy_?”

Sam gives him a look Dean hasn’t seen in over a month, one he might have labeled as _bitchy_ before it started to feel wrong to insult him, and Dean smiles.

“Alright, alright,” he says, holding up pacifying hands. “You need help to get to the car?”

Sam maneuvers himself into the back-seat without much trouble, leaning against the door with his feet laid out on the leather. Black socks to cover the bandages, his hands resting lightly on his skinny thighs, white-wrapped head propped up against the cool glass of the window—he realises, as Dean swings inside and starts the engine, that he hasn’t properly been outside since his feet started to bleed, and that the fresh air is going to feel so unfamiliar once he gets out in it. Not that he’ll get far. Walking isn’t exactly on his list of abilities right now.

Dean drives them into town and a little ways back out again, where the strip malls die out into suburban streets, and turns into a neighbourhood that looks promising. Sam watches the same-faced houses drift slowly by at thirty-five miles an hour—open garages, kids on tricycles zipping up and down the hilly sidewalks; a soccer mom with a fat little kid on her hip raises her hand at them as they pass and Sam thinks about returning the gesture before he thinks that the growing spot of red in his palm might alarm her.

“Jackpot,” Dean says eventually, after several meandering turns, and Sam lifts his head a little to see a tiny local park—a duck pond, a sidewalk winding into a scrubby patch of woods, mottled plastic picnic tables and those stand-alone metal grills, and a colourful playground shaded with trees.

It’s almost evening, but a few families are here enjoying the last of the sunlight, and Dean pulls into the miniature parking lot, over the grass pushing up through the asphalt, and gets out.

He pops Sam’s door and goes around to the trunk, and Sam levers himself up and around, resting his feet on the edge of the doorjamb and leaning his shoulder against the driver’s seat headrest. The dusky breeze is cool, fresher air than he’s tasted in weeks, free of the smell of stale motel cigarettes and mold. The Impala rocks slightly as Dean slams the trunk closed again and sits down in the same style in the driver’s seat, pops a beer bottle open with a practiced motion of his wrist.

Sam glances at him. “Pretty sure that’s illegal in a place like this.”

Dean inclines his head towards a far occupied picnic table where a cooler of alcohol is open, and a few adults mill around, watching their children play. Sam raises an eyebrow but goes quiet again.

They’re not here to be practical, after all. They’re here to get a little space after the cramped confines of the past few rooms, to let Sam stretch his legs as much as he can, stiff as they are with bed-rest.  

Already Sam feels better, more like himself, relaxing into the seat and letting his eyes rove over the little park. A few kids down by the pond, tossing moldy crusts to the ducks who dip and scatter and push ripples into the water; the party of adults at the table and their little ones, all in bright pastels and summer shorts and foam flip-flops, coming and going, dashing up to snatch a handful of pretzels or chips from plastic bowls, to kiss their mothers’ cheeks, and dart back into the playground sand again, deeply engrossed in tag or hide-and-seek or something of that nature.

For some reason it makes Sam smile. For the past few weeks he’s felt, uncomfortably, that Dean’s world, Cas’ world, have been revolving a little too much around him. A position he’s never liked. But here’s proof that everything has been going on without him, unconscious of the blood he’s losing, the weight he’s shedding, the hours he’s spending under the covers with his eyes closed and prayers on his lips.

It’s nice, he thinks. To know that someone out here has no idea who he is or what he’s suffering from, to know that he can sit here and watch them in their little tableau of living for a while.

Someone must have lost the game of tag because the children are dispersing, either scattering off into their own parts of the playground or back to their parents; as if this is a cue, Dean makes a sound in his throat and gets up, and the Impala rocks back again under the loss of his weight.

“There’s a vending machine over by those bathrooms,” he says, pointing to a squat stone building on the opposite side of the duck pond, the kind of city-funded lavatory every municipal baseball field has somewhere on the property. “You want anything?”

“I’m fine,” Sam says.

Dean closes the driver’s side door and pauses for a moment next to Sam’s jutting knee; he clears his throat, reaches in to touch Sam’s shoulder for just a minute, and then starts across the parking lot towards the machines.

Sam watches him go, pleased to see the ease in his step. Getting outside was a good idea.

The Impala’s doorjamb metal is cold under his feet and he shifts them down, lightly onto the asphalt, careful of any stray pebbles or stones. There’s a tiny bite of pain as they come to rest there, but it’s soon gone, and Sam relaxes again, looking back out over the park. The sun is beginning to drift down behind the trees, casting them into silhouette; the kids have come back from the duck pond and the ducks are bobbing somewhere in the middle of the water; everything, save the rustling of the wind in the woods, is very still, peaceful but for the occasional squeal of a child on the playground, a burst of laughter from the parents at their table. Sam hopes, absently, that he’ll dream of this tonight, this small looping scene of quiet suburban happiness—a brief respite from the holy glow that pervades his sleep these days, if only for a little while.

The little girl comes out of nowhere, jarring him out of his vacant gaze off at the tops of the trees with the sound of her voice.

“Mister?”

He jumps—not enough to cause any sparks of pain in his hands and feet but enough to startle her back a step or two. She can’t be more than four or five—her curly blonde hair is pulled back into a truly impressive ponytail, her feet are bare and muddy, and her dimpled hands are wrapped around the stick of a popsicle, orange sticky smears around her mouth. Judging from the gaggle of kids sporting similar popsicles at that picnic table, she’s one of theirs.

Sam tries not to feel awkward, tries not to think about what Dean had said about looking like an ER escapee.

“Hi,” he says.

She eyes him up and down with what constitutes wide-eyed childish suspicion and smacks her lips as her popsicle leaves her mouth. “You got hurt?”

Sam blinks, and then looks down at his hands, quietly placing them palms-down on his knees so as to hide whatever blood is seeping out there.

“Not really,” he says.

“You need a Band-aid? My mommy’s got Band-aids. Over there.” She points with a sticky finger, never taking her eyes off him.

“I’m okay,” he says, watching her plop down nonchalantly on a parking buffer as if she fully intends to keep him company for the rest of her natural life. “But—thank you.”

He glances over that those vending machines, unable to see Dean for the stone columns that encase its foyer. Dean’s the one who’s good with kids, not him.

“I’m Jenny,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Who’re you?”

Sam clears his throat. “I’m Sam,” he says.

“Did you hit your head?” Jenny asks. She finishes off her popsicle and bites down on the stick, letting it pop out from her mouth like a toothpick.

“—yeah,” he says. “Kind of.”

She’s squinting at him like there’s something she can’t quite grasp about him, and Sam glances at the table where her mother or father must be; they’re all absorbed in conversation.

“You should probably get back to your mom or dad,” Sam says. “It’s not safe to talk to strangers, yeah?”

She plucks the popsicle stick from her mouth and tosses it into the grass.

“Bad strangers,” she says. “You’re not a bad stranger, though.”

She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world and Sam shifts, careful not to jar his feet. “Oh, yeah?”

Jenny shakes her head and her ponytail flies back and forth. “You’re a good stranger.”

Sam feels one of those unnameable smiles pulling up onto his face, the kind that come quivering from somewhere in one’s chest for reasons that are always hard to pinpoint.

“How do you know?”

She wipes her sticky hands on her shorts and huffs a little frustrated sigh. “You look like Jesus,” she says, “or something. Anyway, my mommy’s got Band-aids.” She leans her little arms taut onto the parking buffer and looks back toward the playground where her friends are returning to their game; something about her orange-smeared face says that she isn’t too inclined to go and join them.

“I don’t need Band-aids,” Sam says again, still smiling, still unsure why. “But thanks.”

“You got really long hair,” Jenny says. “Boys with long hair look like Jesus. That’s why I said, you look like Jesus.”

Sam has to laugh, and she returns the sound, a fierce little giggle that takes up her whole body, and she grins at him for a moment before looking back to the park again.

He has no intention of showing her his hands and feet—she’s just a child, after all, and for all her talk of Jesus, he knows she won’t understand what his wounds are. He has to wonder what drew her over here to him, the stranger sitting in the long black car. Childish curiosity, most likely.

But she’s still glancing at him as if he’s something strange, as if he’s a pale plant she’s found under a rock, or a pill-bug on her shoe. Something strange, but not frightening.

“How’d you get hurt?” Jenny asks.

She looks at him with big eyes, with a tone in her voice as if she’s asking to be told a bedtime story—and this surprises him; it doesn’t feel like a simple question; she rearranges herself on the buffer as if she expects his explanation to take all evening and is ready and willing to listen.

He recognises that look, he thinks with a jolt. Usually it occupies the faces of people who need to be warned of something, educated about this or that toothsome thing in the dark. People who think there’s something they can learn that will save them. As if she thinks he truly has something to say that she needs to hear.

He isn’t sure what to say, or if he should say anything at all—especially because now he looks up to see a tall brunette woman breaking away from her friends and jogging unhurriedly up the hill towards them. She doesn’t look worried, but she calls Jenny’s name from halfway up and the little girl sits up straighter.

The woman slows once she gets to the parking lot and gives Sam a half-smile, two parts confused and one part apologetic. “Sorry,” she says, quick eyes darting over his hands and head. “I hope Jenny wasn’t bothering you.”

Sam shakes his head, returning her smile softly. “Wanted to offer me a Band-aid,” he says, by way of explanation.

Jenny’s mother’s smile becomes a little nervous and she reaches down to take her daughter’s stained hand. “Are you—?”

Sam takes a breath and shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he says, and he means it.

Jenny’s mother nods, a sort of concerned goodbye, and starts to pull Jenny away, and Sam hears her muttering something about talking to strangers and going off on her own, and Sam hears the little girl’s loud voice responding—“He was gonna tell me things! Momma, doesn’t he look like Jesus?”—and Sam looks down to realise his bandages have been seeping red all this time—staining the gauze and the spots on his thighs where his hands have been resting, and he swallows hard.

She must have seen after all. Maybe—

“Making new friends, Sammy?” Dean’s voice comes from across the parking lot, and Sam looks toward him—one hand buried in a bag of Doritos, eyes drifting over the retreating pair of mother and child.

From down the hill Jenny turns her head over her shoulder to look at Sam and Sam raises his hand a little, and smiles at her, unsure of what exactly she is seeing when she looks at him; she grins back, and turns away, breaking free of her mother to rejoin her friends on the playground—with all the ease of innocence returning to her little blissful tableau of evening.

She’ll have forgotten him by bedtime, Sam thinks, but that’s alright.

The girl’s mother is looking back at the Impala and at them with thinly-veiled concern, and Dean clears his throat, balling up the now-empty Doritos bag and shoving it into a trashcan in the grass.

“Told you people were gonna look at you sideways,” he grunts, and Sam says, “Yeah—I guess.”

“You ready to head back?” Dean asks.

“Just a few more minutes?”

“Sure.”

They’re in no rush, and the sun hasn’t set completely yet, anyway. It’s glittering dimly on the duck pond and the adults at the table are packing up their cooler, a few fathers calling their kids in from the playground. A dozen little legs tramp across the dewy grass while the shadows of the trees lengthen on the gravel, and Sam can hear Dean breathing softly in the front seat, the evening on his face.

They stay until the little picnic table party has started their way up towards their cars, until fireflies begin to light up and dance in the grass at the bottom of the hill. When they leave, it’s almost full dark, and Sam falls into half-sleep against the window, the spring evening air still pure in his lungs. At the back of his closed eyelids are Jenny’s wide eyes and the tone of her voice when she’d asked about his hurt—a little child not too scared to hear the answer. She’d seen him bleed, he was sure. She’d offered him a Band-aid for his pain with all that childhood gravity.

_Blessed are the little ones_ , he thinks dimly, before the Impala comes to a gentle halt in front of the buzzing lights of the motel, and Dean is opening the door for him; Sam leans on him as they go inside to the dull lights and stiff cool sheets on the double beds.

Had her mother not come, Sam thinks, he might have told her, _I didn’t get hurt. I got blessed._

That, he’s sure, she would have understood.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> "'Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs." - Matthew 19:14


End file.
